August 12th, 2268 - Afternoon

The following psychic imprint displayed across the Skein Gates during a Solar Eclipse.

Psychic Imprint Post: All Skein Gates — Arthos
Origin: Superior Mind Meld
Sender: High Chronologer Esxen’Tenadall II of the Thalan

I am told to speak as I saw it, so I will.

I did not mean to come back to the Black Tide. I want that said plainly, and said first, because the last time I recorded something I was informed, at some length, that documentation is not the same as involvement, and that a Thalan who cannot tell the difference is not much use to anyone, least of all himself. I have not forgotten this. I have written it on the inside of my own wrist, in a script even I struggle to read upside down, so that I am reminded of it every morning before I am reminded of my own name.

So when the pull came, and it does not ask permission, it simply arrives, the way the need to sneeze arrives, I told it no. I told it no twice. By the third time I was already untying the rowboat.

I did not interfere, and I want that noted for the record, whatever the record turns out to be. I rowed, and I watched, and that is all I intended to do tonight, and if anyone asks, that is all I did.

The sky above the Tide had gone the colour of a healing bruise, the sun bitten down to a sliver by something with no edge I could name, and I have seen eclipses before, from solid ground, among people who at least had the decency to be frightened of them, but I had never seen one from inside a god’s own Heaven, where the water does not so much reflect the sky as mimic it.

The Reaper sat at anchor ahead of me, black hulled and patient, not resting so much as waiting to be needed, and there on the deck, alone, was Vesmir.There was an egg on the deck beside him, close enough to his boot that he might have been standing guard over it without meaning to, and I want to describe it honestly rather than dress it up for you. It was pearlescent black, shot through with flecks of a deep azure that seemed to shift and catch the light differently depending on where I stood, and it sat in a small nest of black cloth someone had folded for it with more care than skill. The kind of nest a person makes when they do not entirely know how a thing like this is meant to be kept. Beside it sat a few coals, still faintly hot, which I took to be an attempt at warmth, though I suspect it came from desperation rather than any real understanding of what the egg needed. Still, it did not move. It did not glow, or hum, or do anything at all that a mortal eye would call remarkable, but I am not a mortal eye, and when I looked at it the way my kind look at things, I found it entirely unlike Tryst. There was something inside it, full and still, and it was nothing at all like the hollow I had found in the wounded Orb of Healing not a few feet away. I have catalogued a great many things in my long service, and I have never once been able to say I have felt something and had no name at all to give it, not even a wrong one, until that egg. I did not yet understand that I was looking at the reason for everything that follows.

He did not look up when I came alongside, and ordinarily I would tell you that this meant he had not noticed me, since I have spent a very long life learning how to be the sort of thing that Gods and Dragons and mortal Queens do not notice, and I am good at it, better than good at it, but I will not lie to you here of all places. Vesmir is not other Gods. Other Gods live in the moment the way the rest of us do, one after the other, and can be surprised by what walks up behind them. Vesmir does not have that mercy, or that luxury, however you wish to think of it. If I was here, it was already written that I would be here, long before I untied the rowboat, long before I was born, and he had likely known the shape of my arrival for longer than I have been alive to arrive. Whether he knew or not, I cannot say for certain, since he never once turned his head, and he never once spoke to me, and if a God has decided a Thalan is beneath acknowledging he will show you exactly that and no more, so I will only tell you that I do not think it was possible for him not to know. I will let you make of that what you will.

He had the Oblivion Dial out in his hand, and I have read of it in three languages and never once seen it before tonight. I will say only that it is smaller than the stories make it sound, and somehow worse for it. He turned it over and over between long fingers, sand hissing one way and then, impossibly, the other, as though it could not decide which direction time wished to run.

“Nothing.” He said, not to me mind you, to himself or perhaps the cosmos itself. “Nothing? Nothing again?!” He shook the Dial in frustration. The sand a turmoil within the glass as he did. After a moment he composed himself with a deep breath. He stared deeply into the sands and turned the Dial over once more but once more the sand refused him. “Why nothing?”

It was this moment I realized whom he spoke to, the orb, Tryst.

It sat on a shelf bolted near the wheel, small and cracked and dim as a coal going out, and Vesmir spoke to it the way a man speaks to someone across a supper table, easily and without performance, the words falling into the gaps of a conversation that only one of them seemed to be having.

“You’d tell me if you could see something I couldn’t,” he said to it. “Wouldn’t you, Tryst.”

It was not phrased as a question so much as it was shaped like one out of old habit.

I confess I did something here that I will not call interference, only professional diligence, and looked at the orb the way my kind look at a thing when we wish to know what it’s made of. I have looked at trees this way, and stones, and once, memorably, a very old and very offended turtle, and I found in Tryst nothing at all. No pulse of the kind even a dying thing carries. No warmth behind the cracks, waiting for its turn to answer him. I have, in my long service, been near enough to other Orbs of Power to know their particular flavour, if flavour is even the word for it, and it is not a thing I have ever been able to describe cleanly to another living soul, since it is not mortal magic, and it is not draconic magic, and it is certainly not the borrowed light or darkness of the Celestial Planes. It is only itself, some old cosmic thing with no family I can name it kin to. Whatever that flavour is, Tryst did not have so much as a trace of it left in him. Whatever he had once been, he was not that now, and he was not anything else either, as far as I could tell.

I have watched grief before, more of it than I would care to count, since it is most of what my order is paid in, but I had never watched a God carry on a conversation with something I could find no life in whatsoever, and come away from it wearing the quiet satisfaction of a man who believes himself heard. I did not know what to do with that, and I am not certain I do now, so I will only tell you what I saw and let you decide what to do with it yourselves.

He set the Dial down on the rail and rubbed at his eyes with the heel of one hand, the way I have seen exhausted soldiers do it, and exhausted kings, and now, apparently, exhausted Time Gods.

“I can read the fall of an empire from the way a farmer plants his crop wrong three seasons running,” he told Tryst, conversationally, as though he were only continuing something he had already been saying for a while. “I watched Kael’s temper crack four hundred years before it actually did. I knew which mortal would break Cassandra’s heart, and when, and I was right down to the hour.” He paused, “Wait no, that hasn’t happened yet.” He picked the Dial back up and turned it, the sand hissing the wrong way again. “This is not that. It is not dim, and it is not clouded, it is simply gone, as if something reached up and tore the page out of the book before I could read it.”

He looked, for a moment, toward what was left of the sun, and something in the set of him changed, as if he just realized the problem was larger than anticipated.

“The eclipse is not the thing, Tryst,” he said, slower now, as though he were working it out for himself as he spoke it aloud, which I suspect he was. “I have seen the moon steal the sun before. I could tell you the hour of the next one and the one after that and the one a hundred years past that no living mortal will see. That is not what has gone dark on me.” He turned the Dial over once more, and let it fall still in his palm. “There is more coming tonight than this. The sky is not finished.”

He was quiet for a while after that, long enough that I began to wonder if he had forgotten I was there at all, though I have already told you what I think about that.

“I will need to see the stars when they come,” he said at last, and there was something in his voice I had not heard in it before, something that did not sit easily on a God, though I will not pretend to know the correct word for it. “The planets, when they align. Whatever the sky means to finish tonight, I mean to be looking at it directly when it does, and not through a Dial that has decided to stop speaking to me.” He looked around him then, at the water, at the dark shape of the Deadlands crouched along the far shore, as though seeing where he was for the first time in some while. “This is not the place for it.”

He did not say anything further, and he did not need to.

The Reaper woke beneath him like something old and eldritch, not all at once but gathering itself in pieces, a groan through the hull first, then the creak of old rigging drawing tight. Her black sails rose without a single hand touching them, filling with a wind I could not feel from where I sat, and had no business existing at all on waters as still as these had been all night. Her anchor came up dripping something that was not quite water. Vesmir did not move from where he stood at the rail, did not so much as glance at the sails or the wheel that turned itself slowly beside him, and I understood, watching it, that the ship had never needed him to sail her so much as she had simply been waiting for him to decide where they were going. He did glance for a moment at the egg, almost concerned, like the sudden movement might knock it from its resting nest. It was almost a fatherly concern and my heart ached for but a moment. Once he was sure the egg was still secure he turned his attention back to the Dial.

The Reaper began to move.

I want it on the record that I did not think, not for one moment, that I would be able to keep pace with a God’s own ship under full sail, and I want it on the record equally that I tried anyway, because that pull I told you about at the start of all this does not particularly care what is or is not possible; it only cares that I am where it wants me. So I put my back into the oars and rowed after her, small and foolish and soaked to the elbows, while ahead of me the Reaper cut through the black water beneath a sun that was still only half itself, carrying a God who did not know what he was sailing toward, but meant to look it in the eye regardless.

As the ship cut through the spiritual waters, twin glows alighted in the near endless gloom of the Deadlands. The Ghostlight of the Wayward Lamp illuminated the Goddess Haldora in its pale flickering flame as she watched from her City of the Echoes the event above. In almost opposition, the grim yellow spotlights that were the eyes of the Dragon Oblivion narrowed skyward, his gigantic shadow framing the Isle of No Thing in his temple of the Detritus. What they could not glean from the God of Time’s ministrations, they would strain to perceive in reality’s now heaving form.

August 12th, 2268 - Dusk

The following psychic imprint displayed across the Skein Gates shortly after the Sunset.

Psychic Imprint Post: All Skein Gates — Arthos
Origin: Superior Mind Meld
Sender: High Chronologer Esxen’Tenadall II of the Thalan

I did not catch her easily. I want that understood before anything else, because a Thalan does not often admit to struggling, and I am admitting it now.

The current beneath me had changed somewhere in the rowing, though I could not tell you the moment it happened, only that it had, the water going from merely swift to something that pulled at the little boat with intense speed. Ahead of me the Reaper’s black sails still cut the dark, closer now than they had been, and it was only as I closed the distance that I understood why she had slowed, what I was actually rowing toward, and what she was resting upon. The Black Tide did not narrow there, or thin itself down the way a river is meant to when it nears its end. It simply stopped, all at once, as though something had reached up out of whatever holds the Deadlands together and torn a hole clean through the bottom of it. The whole black weight of the river was pouring itself through that hole and away, endlessly, into a fall with no floor I could see or imagine. I want to tell you plainly that I have never in my long service been so afraid of a body of water, and I want to tell you, just as plainly, that fear was not the only thing I felt looking at it.

Beyond the falling, where by every sense I possess there ought to have been nothing at all, there was instead the Astral Void, and I confess that for one unforgivable moment I forgot entirely to be afraid, because I had never seen anything so beautiful in all my centuries of observation. It was not dark the way the night sky is dark. It was a deep and endless violet, folded through with threads of colour that had no source I could find, and drifting through all of it, unhurried, were shapes I could not name, vast and slow and utterly indifferent to the water pouring past them into whatever waited below. That domain, I understood, belongs to more than the Firstborn Isana alone, and I will tell you honestly that even my own kind, who are said to know a great many things no one else was ever meant to know, cannot say with any certainty what else calls that violet distance home. Only that something does, several somethings perhaps, older and stranger than a single Dragon’s claim upon it. I understood, distantly, that I was looking at the true measure of a place my own people have only ever glimpsed the edges of, that this was laid bare in front of me by a wound that should never have opened. I also understood too that I had absolutely no business seeing it, and that I would remember it regardless, for as long as I live, however long that turns out to be; which given my current situation, shouldn’t be that long. The ship I was rowing toward sat balanced upon the very last thread of water still holding, tilted forward into that impossible violet distance like something leaning to admire a view.

I threw the rope before I had entirely decided to throw it. My hands, I think, made the decision without consulting me, which I am told is common in moments such as these, though I had never had one before to compare it to. It caught on something along the Reaper’s stern, some cleat or spar I could not properly see in the dark, and I want it on the record that it caught by no particular skill of mine, only luck. The kind of luck a Thalan is not meant to rely upon and yet here I was, relying on it entirely.

I held on. The boat did not.

It went out from under me somewhere in the pulling, and I will not dwell on it, since it was only a boat, and I had other, more pressing matters to attend to, chiefly the matter of not following it.

The Reaper herself hung over that edge in a manner no honest ship has any business hanging. I have sailed on real vessels, the kind built by real hands out of real timber, and I can tell you that a ship four fifths past her own edge, keel and half her hull suspended over open falling nothing, ought to have gone over already. Ought to have gone over the moment the water beneath her stern stopped being water. She had not. She sat there, black and patient, tilted forward into the dark as if she had already decided the fall held nothing worth her concern. Her stern still touched the last thread of the Tide that remained, and that, apparently, was enough. I do not pretend to understand the physics of a God’s own ship. I do not believe physics was consulted in her making.

Vesmir stood near the helm, and he had not moved from the spot I last saw him in, though the world around him had rearranged itself considerably. He was looking down, not at the falling behind his ship, but at the egg still nested in its little bed of black cloth at his feet.

“It should not be doing this,” he said, and I did not know at first whether he meant the Tide, or the egg, or something else I had not yet been told to worry about.

He crouched, and touched two fingers lightly to the shell, like a physician touching a patient he already suspects he cannot help, and then he straightened again and looked out at the ruin where his own river used to be.

“The alignment,” he said, to Tryst, since it was always to Tryst, “is doing this. It will pass. Whatever holds the planes apart is being pulled thin tonight, thinner than I have felt it pulled in a very long while, and when it lets go again, the Tide will remember what it is and put itself back together the way water always does.” He watched the black edge a moment longer. “I only wonder about the ones already in it.”

He did not explain what he meant by that, not directly, but I had been doing this long enough to follow the shape of a thought even when a God declines to finish it aloud. The spirits the Tide carries do not choose their own current. They are only carried, and most of them are carried somewhere unpleasant. Tonight, for reasons none of them will ever be told, a great many of those unpleasant destinations are simply gone, the road washed out from beneath them, and where they end up instead is a question even the Celestial who tends that river could not answer with any confidence.

“Fortunate, perhaps,” he said, “for the ones bound for the Hellstack. Unfortunate for everyone left to make sense of them wherever they end up instead.” He paused. “I genuinely do not know which.”

He left the rail then, and returned to where Tryst sat on its little shelf, and picked the orb up gently, as a man picks up something he has picked up ten thousand times before and will pick up ten thousand times again.

“The egg is not doing anything, Tryst,” he said, and there was a frustration in it now that had not been in his voice before, quiet, but present. “It has been a week. When I carried Essyllt’s egg back to Melinda, I could feel it. It pulsed under my hands like something with somewhere it very much intended to go, whatever the Lords of the Fae Courts had worked into it still moving through the shell long after their hands were done with it, and I did not understand the working, not truly, but I could feel that something was happening inside it, and that felt like tending something. Like keeping something warm that wanted to be kept warm. I could also see it. The future of it. The rebirth of the Purple. Just like I saw that I would bend the knee and liberate the spirit of the Green. But I cannot see the future of this egg.” He looked down at the shell in its bed of cold cloth and dying coals, its black surface catching the last of the dial light in threads of azure that did nothing, tonight, but sit there and shine. “This does nothing. It has done nothing since the moment it was placed in my hands, and I do not know if that is because it is simply slower than hers was, or because it is not the same thing at all, and I confess, Tryst, that I would very much like it to be the first of those two answers and not the second.”

He was quiet after that, and I did not interrupt him, because I have learned, across a great many centuries, that silence is often the only respectful thing a witness has to offer.

“She was different,” he said, more softly, and I understood without being told that he had moved from the topic of the egg to the Purple Firstborn. “Essyllt. Difficult, and vain, and entirely without mercy toward anyone she has decided does not deserve it, which is nearly everyone of such category. I have earned perhaps an inch of her patience over ten years of very careful behaviour, and I would not call it more than that, not honestly. But there is something in her I find myself glad exists in the world, and I do not examine that feeling too closely, because I suspect if I did I would not care for what I found underneath it, and she would like that even less than I would.” He set Tryst back on its shelf. “I gave my word to her. I intend to keep it, whatever this egg turns out to be.”

Above us, the sky was finishing whatever it had been building toward all evening, one light after another sliding into a line I could not have drawn myself but could feel, somehow, resolving into rightness, like a held breath resolves when it is finally released.

“Nobody agrees on what those lights are, Tryst,” Vesmir said, tipping his head back to watch them settle. “Some believe them other realms entirely, whole worlds hung up there like lanterns. Some believe them something closer to spirit than to place. The Cindus’Thalan, as the Fire Elves style themselves in the old tongue, believe they are their own dead, the worthiest of them, those who gathered enough water in life to be carried up past their Black Desert and through what they call the Celestial Canopy, to shine forever afterward as guides for the living below.” He was quiet a moment. “It is a lovely thing to believe. I will tell you honestly, since you are the only one I tell such things to honestly, that once a spirit leaves the Material Plane, there is only the Inner Realm, and the Outer beyond it, and past that…” He shook his head slowly. “… I do not know. I have never needed to know before tonight.”

That was the moment the last of the six lights found its place, and the sky above the Black Tide went, for the space of one long breath, entirely still.

Then, the Astral Echo came. The Firstborn Isana.

I did not see her arrive so much as I became aware that the darkness at the ragged edge of the Tide, the same darkness the Reaper hung over, had grown a shape, vast and patient and entirely too calm. Amethyst and starlight caught somewhere in scales I could see only in outline, the rest of her lost to whatever the Astral Void does to light that tries to describe things within it. She did not cross onto our side of the edge. I do not believe she could have, any more than Vesmir could have crossed onto hers without falling into the abyss, and I want that understood plainly, because it matters for what came after.

“I felt a tearing begin in mine own realm,” she said, and her voice carried the particular evenness of something ancient enough to no longer need to raise itself for effect, “at the very hour the Inner and Outer Realms drew close enough to touch. I doth not believe that a coincidence, Gatekeeper. Gods meddling with powers they doth nary understand tend to leave this sort of mess in their wake.”

Vesmir turned to face her, and inclined his head, not deeply, but not carelessly either, the particular small bow of a man who has decided courtesy costs him nothing and might buy him something.

“I have no hand in this, Isana of the Firstborn,” he said. “I felt the tear as you did, from my own side of it, and I do not know its cause any better than you do.” He paused, and something in his voice shifted, dropping its guard for just a moment, in a way I do not think he intended for either of us to notice. “If I am honest with you, the tear troubles me less than what waits behind it. I cannot read past tonight. Time is not written here, or it is being kept from me, by something closer and larger than anything I have had cause to fear in a very long while. I would tell you if I knew more.”

“Would’st thou.” It was not a question.

Her gaze moved past him then, to the small black shape resting at his feet, its azure flecks catching what little light remained. Something in the stillness of her changed, sharpened, the way a predator’s stillness sharpens the moment it has found the thing it was looking for. Her eye narrowed as the orb Phell, from whence her opposite eye once rested, focused its luminance upon the egg. Her form grew slightly.

“The egg of the Green,” Vesmir said, before she could ask, since I do not think he saw any use in delay. “I am caring for it, until I know better what it needs.”

“It is not an egg.”

She said it as one corrects a child who has used the wrong word for something sacred, patient, and entirely without warmth.

“It is an Icon,” she said. “That is the word for what a Firstborn leaves behind when they die, Gatekeeper, and I would’st think a God who hath spent a decade bound to one of us might bear knowledge of that by now. In fairness, Essyllt is not the brightest of us, so perhaps not. There is not a scale’s worth of the draconic left inside it. No breath, no fire, no thought. Only a memory of what she was, folded down into something small enough to hold.” She let that sit a moment. “I have seen this before twice. Ta-Ba-Ret left hers in the chest of a mortal Orc. When it had burst forth, animated by Ta-Ba-Ret evolutionary impetus, they took it for another parasite, and crushed it underfoot without a second thought. It was gone before a single mortal understood they hath just destroyed the last remnant of a Firstborn’s own dying.” She paused. “Daedalon’s Icon, I could not tell you where it lies. Perhaps Pandora destroyed it outright, the same as she destroyed him, wishing no trace of the Silver Firstborn left behind to be recovered. Perhaps it sits even now in some corner of her own hall, kept as a trophy of what she did that day. Or perhaps, and I think this the likeliest of the three, it was simply overlooked in the horror of losing him, left where he fell near Galaheim’Vox, and lies still under some hundreds of years of ice and snow, forgotten by everyone but perhaps Zsiera.” Her eyes did not leave the little shell. “I doth not know why these Icons exist when we die, or what purpose, if any, was meant for them. I hath never once had the opportunity to see if they become anything other than what thou possess now. My sight is unlimited in this Astral Plane, yet not for this concept. But the moment a Firstborn dies, a small, hollow thing is left behind where once something vast used to be. A headstone, perhaps, is the kindest way to think of it. A trophy would be the truer word, for anyone base enough to keep one, and I hath known several who would commit exactly that sacrilege against a Firstborn’s memory without a moment’s hesitation, godling, so do not imagine thyself above suspicion simply because thy intentions tonight are kinder than most.”

Vesmir did not answer that at once. I watched something move through him, quick and quiet, gone before it had fully arrived, and he did not give her the satisfaction of naming it.

“Grant it unto me,” Isana said, and there was no request in it at all. “That is not thy cenotaph to keep. Whatever use thy kind means to make of a dead Firstborn’s memory, I promise thee it will end in a use she would’st nary hath chosen for herself. She was the best of us, I will not have thee sully her memory.”

“No.”

He said it simply, without heat, like a man declines something he has already decided upon long before being asked.

“She entrusted it to me,” he said. “I will not make myself unworthy of that.”

Isana did not move to cross the boundary between them, and I understood, watching her, that this was not restraint so much as simple fact, a line she was no more capable of stepping over than Vesmir was capable of stepping onto her side of it without falling into the void, whatever either of them might have wished otherwise. That she could not reach him herself did not mean she was without reach. I have no doubt she keeps servants enough in her own domain to trouble a God from a distance, and older, stranger things than servants besides, half-glimpsed shapes drifting through that violet dark I would not care to have named for me, let alone owe a favour to. Her power here was not diminished in the slightest. Only her ability to stand in the same place as the thing she wished to use it on. Her Astral Self, more than a match for any Celestial within the Astral Void, was waiting just beneath the surface of scale and sinew to manifest if needed.

“Come into my realm, then,” she said, and there was an invitation in it dressed very thinly over something else entirely. “Where I am not so restrained as I am here at this border. I can allow thy ship to pass through the astral barrier via the Ethereal Winds. We could’st speak further. At length.”

“I must respectfully decline.” Vesmir said, tipping his tricorn hat in the way a nobleman would, which I found, and still do, a strange thing to have witnessed.

Isana’s mouth curved, not quite a smile.

“A pity,” she said. “I would have enjoyed…”

She did not finish it.

The tear opened behind her without warning or ceremony, a wound tearing wide across the dark fabric of her own domain, vast and sudden, and through it, for the length of a single breath before she turned to face it, I saw them. Small, distant, uncountable, a swarm of falling lights already gathering on the other side of whatever thin membrane had, until this moment, kept them out of the Astral Void.

Isana did not look back at us again. She was already moving, already vast and terrible and entirely occupied with the wound in her own territory, and whatever she had meant to say to Vesmir was left unsaid, which I suspect troubled him a great deal less than it might have troubled someone with less practice in being threatened in such measured fashion.

Above the wound in her domain, I could see plainly now what the sky itself had been arranging all evening. The Plane of Life sat closest to us, a soft and constant glow low along the dark. Beside it, small and furious, burned what I took to be the Plane of Fire. Further along hung a light so impossibly black it was visible only by the stars it swallowed, and I did not need Vesmir to tell me that was Death, keeping its place beside its opposite the way it always eventually does. Further still, pale and never quite settling into one shape, sat the Far Realm, or some reflection of it. Beside that, a light the colour of an old bruise, which I took, with some discomfort, for the Shadow Plane. Last of the six, furthest and coldest and utterly unmoving, sat a single white point I was told afterward was the Celestial Realm itself, where the other Gods keep their own Heavens, and even from that distance it looked to me like something watching, rather than something merely present.

Vesmir did not look at any of them for very long. He reached into his coat instead and drew out a spyglass, small and brass and plainly very old, etched along its length with markings I did not recognize and did not think it wise to ask after. I understood, without being told, that whatever the Oblivion Dial had refused to show him tonight, he intended to go looking for it now with his own eyes, through a piece of ordinary craft that had never, in all my long study of such things, been ordinary at all.

He raised it toward the tear, and toward whatever still burned beyond it, and began speaking softly to himself, like a man speaks when he no longer trusts his own memory to hold what he is about to witness.

I did not catch all of what he said. I do not think I was meant to.

We waited there. That is all I can tell you of what came next, because it is all that transpired. We waited there to see what was going to happen.

August 12th, 2268 - Midnight

The following psychic imprint displayed across the Skein Gates shortly after midnight.

Psychic Imprint Post: All Skein Gates — Arthos
Origin: Superior Mind Meld
Sender: High Chronologer Esxen’Tenadall II of the Thalan

I do not know how long we sat there. I want to be honest about that rather than invent some tidy number for the sake of the record, since time behaves strangely enough on the Black Tide when nothing at all is wrong with it, and considerably worse when a hole has been torn through the bottom of it and left open for hours at a stretch. It was some good long while. That is the truest thing I can tell you.

It was Isana who broke the waiting, and I confess I had half forgotten she meant to come back at all, occupied as she had been with the wound in her own realm.

“Move thy ship, Gatekeeper.”

Her voice reached us across the tear as thunder reaches you after the lightning has already gone, present but somehow behind itself, and there was none of the earlier mockery left in it, only something flatter and more urgent.

“I hath seen this before,” she said. “Not often. I doth not know why the realms tear themselves the way they hath done tonight, and I will not pretend that I do. But it hath happened before, within this last decade, and in ages thou were not yet made to witness. What comes through such a tear, while such hath never once seemed to me a malevolent thing, is dangerous regardless of its intentions. Malevolence is nary required to destroy something standing in the wrong place.”

Vesmir did not ask her why she troubled herself to say it.

“You needn’t concern yourself on my account,” he said, and there was a dryness in it that I do not think was lost on either of them.

“I do not,” Isana said, and the honesty in it was almost its own kind of insult. “I concern myself with the Icon. If we are being blunt, I am quite fine with thy obliteration. Thy story would be remembered, as would any other. But I would’st rather it did not become anything at all while that Icon is still in thy keeping.”

He did not answer that directly, only inclined his head once more, and turned from the rail, and I watched him speak a few low words to his own ship. The Reaper came about beneath him without complaint, the black sails swinging heavy against a wind I still could not feel, and we drew back from that ragged edge and the violet dark beyond it, out into the wider dark of the Tide proper, until the tear was a smaller thing behind us. Although never so small that either of us stopped watching it.

Vesmir stood at the bow and raised the spyglass again, and I watched him work it slowly across the sky, from the six settled planar lights down to whatever now moved in the black beyond the tear.

“There,” he said, to Tryst, since I do not believe he had ever once, across the whole of this night, spoken a single sentence that was not addressed to that orb first and to the rest of the world only as an afterthought. “I can see them properly now. A shoal of something, Tryst. That is the only word that comes close. Small, dark, wreathed in a dim fire that does not seem to be burning them, and moving the way fish move, or birds, in one long unbroken turn, all of them at once, as if a single mind decided the direction and every one of them simply agreed to it.” He was quiet a moment, tracking them. “Beautiful, actually. I had not expected that. A swarm, perhaps, is closer to it.”

I watched his shoulders change. It was the kind of change that marks the exact moment a beautiful thing becomes, instead, a problem.

“They’ve turned,” he said. “All at once, the same as before, but toward the tear now, and through it.” A pause. “Toward us, in point of fact.”

He lowered the spyglass a fraction, and raised it again, and I heard something in his voice shift that I had not once heard from him across two long memories of watching him be entirely unbothered by things that would have unmade lesser beings.

“They’re moving toward us. Quite quickly, actually.” Another pause, shorter than the last. “Rather too quickly.”

He dropped the spyglass. It struck the deck and rolled, and I did not see where it stopped, because I was watching him instead, watching him reach for Tryst and gather the small cracked orb into the folds of his coat in the same motion, quick and unthinking.

“Fuck me,” he said, with the calm resigned clarity of a man who knew there was no fighting this particular fate.

Then the sky came down on top of us.

I will not pretend to have seen the strike itself in full, only pieces of it, but one piece I saw clearly, and I do not believe my eyes deceived me, however much I might have wished them to. In the last instant before the light took everything, I saw a thin ribbon of green come up out of the wreck of the wheelhouse, out of the little nest where the Icon had been resting all this while, swirling once around itself like smoke caught in a draft, and I watched that green vanish into the falling dark thing an instant before it struck, drawn into it the way water is drawn down a hole, gone before I could properly call it anything at all. Then the light took everything, white and total and gone in the same instant. A great tearing crack followed it that I felt in my teeth before I properly heard it in my ears.

The Reaper bucked beneath everything like a living thing struck across the flank, and I was thrown, the rope I had lashed to her stern hours before pulling taut against my chest so hard I believe it will leave its shape there for days afterward. I want it on the record that I did not let go, though I would not swear to you that this was through any courage of mine rather than simple animal refusal.

Vesmir went over the rail entirely.

I saw him go, a dark shape thrown clear of the deck and out into the black water below, and I confess that for one very long moment I believed I had just watched a God die in front of me, which would have been, I imagine, a fairly significant thing to have to relay.

He did not die. I wish that said plainly and immediately, so as not to draw the moment out longer than it deserves.

The debris was still settling, dust and splinters and small burning fragments hissing where they touched the Tide and went out, when he rose. Not swam. Rose, unhurried, entirely without the indignity that ought to accompany being blasted off one’s own ship into a river. I watched him set one foot and then the other onto the surface of the Black Tide as though it were paving stone laid there for his convenience, which I suppose, in the truest sense, it always had been.

His hand went first to the folds of his coat, and I saw him pause there, feeling for something small and cracked and, evidently, still whole, and only once he seemed satisfied of that did something else occur to him, some second and more urgent thought arriving a beat behind the first, and I watched him go from walking to something considerably faster than walking in the space of that single realization.

The Reaper was not destroyed. The precision of this fact is paramount, since the sight of her might have suggested otherwise to anyone watching who did not know her nature. Where the wheelhouse had stood there was instead a wide black crater, timber curled back on itself and still smoking at the edges, and the helm itself was simply gone, along with the shelf that had held Tryst not an hour before. But she still floated, still sat upright on what remained of the Tide beneath her, patient even now.

Vesmir climbed aboard through the gap where a rail had been, and stood a moment surveying the damage, and let out what I can only describe as a deific sigh.

He raised one hand, and made a small, unhurried gesture, and the timber began, slowly and without any great fanfare, to knit itself back together, splinters rising and rejoining, the black scorch along the edges fading.

He did not wait for it to finish before he stepped through the closing gap, into the wreck of the wheelhouse, searching.

The little nest of black cloth was still there, burnt at one corner, the coals inside it long since scattered and cold.

The Icon was not.

In its place sat something smaller, and rounder, and entirely still, deep viridian in colour, the kind of green that has cooled and hardened past the point of anything still growing, and Vesmir went very still above it. An Orb of Power.

He reached for it.

His hand stopped short of the surface, hovering there, and I watched him hold that position a long moment. The way a man holds his hand over a stove he is no longer certain is safe to touch, though he cannot say precisely why he suspects it. Then he drew the hand back entirely, and simply looked at the thing instead. He did not touch it, and did not speak, and I do not believe, in that particular silence, he wanted either.

I looked at it myself, the way my kind look at things and I will tell you honestly that I did not enjoy what I found. There was a nature to it, faint but unmistakable, something of green things and growing things and the quiet insistence of a seed toward the light, though bent now toward some narrower purpose I could not immediately name. Fertility, I want to say, though I offer that word to you with real hesitation, since I am not certain it is the correct one, only the nearest one available to me. Whatever this thing now was, it wanted things to grow. That was the whole of what I could tell.

I did not say any of this aloud. That must be conveyed with all certainty. I only stood there turning it over, piece by piece, like a puzzle box looking for the seam that will finally open it, and I do not doubt Vesmir could see me doing it, the same as I could see, in his own stillness, something turning over just as slowly behind his eyes.

He reached for it a second time.

This time he did not stop.

He lifted it, carefully, in both hands, and he held it a long while without a single word.

Then he looked up.

The tear still hung open in the distance, smaller now than it had been, and there, at the ragged border of it, was Isana, vast and still in her full Astral Self, her attention fixed not on Vesmir but on the thing cradled in his hands. I could not read a Dragon’s face across that distance, and I will not pretend otherwise, but I did not need to. There was a particular quality to her stillness that needed no translation. Whatever she had expected to see recovered from that wreckage, I do not believe it was this.

She moved before I had finished the thought.

I have called her vast, and patient, and I stand by both, but I want it understood that neither word prepared me for how quickly a thing of her size could close a distance when it chose to. She came at the boundary with unnatural speed, six floating astral arms already outstretched well before she had any hope of reaching it, some old and instinctive want written plainly across the whole shape of her; the same want, I imagine, that draws any God or Firstborn toward any Orb of Power the instant they lay eyes on one. Or perhaps the ‘want’ was Phell’s own, seeking to fervently make contact with this new orb before its fate was decided elsewhere.

Whatever the truth may have been, neither Phell nor Isana reached it.

The tear closed before she had covered half the distance, shutting itself calm and complete, like a closed hand. Where the violet dark, and the drifting shapes, and the Dragon of Enlightenment reaching for something she had not yet understood had all been only a moment before, there was now only the ordinary dark of the Black Tide, whole again.

Vesmir stood there a long while, looking at the place where she had been.

Then he set the viridian orb down upon the deck. Not gently, exactly, and not carelessly either, but with the particular deliberateness of a God setting down something he has not yet decided what to do with, and turned back to where Tryst sat in its worn cradle of cloth, and for a long moment he only looked at him.

“I believe I could restore you with this,” he said. He did not reach for it. “I find I am suspicious of my own suggestion, Tryst, which is a new feeling for me, and not a welcome one.”

He crouched down beside the cracked orb, low, the way a man kneels beside something small.

“I think I understand… and I feel like a child. I think I have broken my own tenet,” he said. “Not tonight. Long before tonight. If I am right about what I watched happen to that Icon, then before you were ever Tryst, before you were ever an orb of anything, you were something far greater than either. You had a life the same as any Firstborn or God has a life, and a proper ending waiting at the end of it. I took that ending from you the day I chose to hold you together instead of letting you go where you were meant to go, if anywhere.” He was quiet a moment. “I have spent ten years hunting for the orb of a Firstborn who corrupted the natural order of one Dragon’s death, Tryst, and the entire while I did it, I was standing on the deck of my own ship, keeping you from yours.”

He did not go on immediately. I did not fill the silence either. Some things, once said, deserve to sit a while before anything else is asked of them.

“I know you cannot hear me,” he said, and there was something almost gentle in the way he said it; the particular gentleness of a man being honest with himself for what may have been the first time in a very long while. “I have always known that, I think, even when I told myself otherwise. But I am going to say this regardless, because you deserve to have it said, whether or not it ever reaches you.”

He picked the orb up, familiar, unthinking, one last time.

“I am sorry,” he said. “For however many years I have kept you like this, cracked and hollow and held together by nothing but my own unwillingness to be the one who let go of you. I told myself it was kindness. I am no longer certain that is true.”

He turned it slowly in his hands.

“You should know why I did it, at least. I do not think I have ever said it aloud to anyone, and I find, tonight of all nights, that I would like to have said it at least once before I stop.” He looked out at the dark water, not at the orb. “I am the God of Time and of Natural Death, Tryst. I see the whole of everyone’s road the moment I look at them, not just where they are going, but where they end, every one of them, always, whether I wish to see it or not. There is no meeting a spirit for me the way other beings meet each other. There is only ever meeting them and knowing, in the same instant, exactly how and when I will lose them. I have found, across a very long existence, that this makes it extraordinarily difficult to keep anyone close. Grief is easier to bear when it arrives as a surprise. My grief starts the moment I meet them, because I have already lost them. I have never once had that mercy, save with you.” He paused. “You were the only one who never gave me that grief. Not because you could not have. Because I made certain of it, myself, before it ever had the chance to come.”

He held the orb a moment longer.

“Thank you,” he said, “for being my friend. When you were alive, before I ever laid a hand on you to keep you from where you belonged, and after, in whatever unnatural half-state I made of you since. I do not know if either version of you would forgive me for the second part. I would understand if neither did.”

He was quiet, and then he said, very softly, in a voice I do not think was meant entirely for me to hear, though I heard it regardless, and I record it now only because I believe it was meant to be recorded, even if it was not meant to be overheard:

“It’s about time, if I am being honest. I hope you understand.” He paused. “Goodbye, my friend.”

He let his power go.

I did not see it leave him, exactly, only its absence, and the orb in his hands came apart like an old dried thing; without violence, without sound. As small pale shards fell from between his fingers and down into the black water below, they did not float, and did not linger; only sank, and were gone.

I confess I felt something come to my own eyes then, which I did not expect of myself, and which I chronicle only because I promised at the outset of all this to give you the truth of what I witnessed rather than a tidier version of it. It was, I think, a very sad thing to watch, however small the thing being mourned. I do not know that I have ever seen a friendship end so gently and so completely at once.

Vesmir watched the water close over the last of the shards.

Then he turned to the viridian orb.

He lifted it, and held it much as he had held Tryst, though I noticed, and I do not think I imagined it, that he held this one more carefully. The particular care of a man who has just finished learning, at some cost, exactly what carelessness can do.

“Do you have a name?” he asked. “Do you know what you were?”

I did not hear an answer. I desire that stated plainly, because I do not believe there was a sound to hear, and yet something in Vesmir’s posture shifted, as if he was listening rather than merely waiting for his turn to speak again.

“Interesting,” he said, after a while. “No. Of course not. You are brand new. In every sense that matters. You are not draconic and not celestial. Born only moments ago, out of something that ended so that you could begin.” He turned the orb slightly, considering it. “I am Vesmir, God of Time, and of Natural Death, among other titles I find considerably less use for. Would you like me to give you a name?”

Another pause, longer than the first.

“Excellent,” he said.

He was silent a moment, and something crossed his face that I had not seen there once across this entire long night, something almost fond, almost light.

“I will name you after an acquaintance,” he said, and there was a slyness in it, the particular slyness of a man enjoying an irony he suspects will never once be understood by the thing he is sharing it with. “One of the very few beings I have ever had cause to properly respect. I will call you Suul.”

The orb did not answer in any way I could witness, and yet Vesmir tilted his head slightly, as though it had.

“Good,” he said. “I am glad.” Then, more gently, “However, Suul. You are not for me. There is a great deal of good you might do in the worlds beyond this ship, and I do not think I am the one meant to shape what you become, having so recently learned what becomes of things I try to keep. I may come to regret this. I already see the future in which my brothers and sisters in the Light Pantheon chastise me for it. I find that I do not care. I am going to let you go and find your own way, and find others better suited to whatever it is you now are.

He held it up slightly, as if presenting it to the shadowy water below.

“It was a pleasure meeting you,” he said. “I can see your future now, Suul, clearer than I have been able to see anything all this long night, and though I could not tell it to you even if you asked, and I do not think you would want me to, I will say only that I am pleased by it. Genuinely.” He paused. “Goodbye, my new friend. I am glad I could help you continue on toward whatever you were always meant to become. I am only sorry I did not understand sooner what that meant, or what it cost the last friend I tried to keep from it.”

He lowered the orb to the water’s edge, and let it go.

It drifted, unhurried, out onto the black current, and the Tide carried it from us, smaller and smaller. Despite the buffeting waters, its surface seemed protected from abrasion and force; perhaps a final parting gift for its journey by the Gatekeeper. The Black Tide, I should tell you, reaches every corner of every realm there is, given time enough, and I do not know where Suul is bound, or what shore it will finally wash up against, or whose hands it will end up in, only that the river does not stop, and does not lose things, and that somewhere, someday, it will arrive.

Vesmir stood alone at the rail for a long while after that, and did not speak.

I broke my oath that night, and I will not pretend otherwise, nor will I pretend I regret it, whatever consequence follows. Maybe I am not very good at this, but some things ask too much of a watcher who is also, whatever my order likes to forget, a being with a spirit and feelings enough to be moved by them. Perhaps I follow in the perceived folly of my father’s footsteps, but I care not at this moment. We Thalan are not quite mortal, not in the way the younger races mean the word, and we do not die the way they die, but we are not so old or so far removed from the realm’s own making that we feel nothing of what passes through it, whatever the rest of Arthos assumes of us. I crossed the deck, and I put my hand on his shoulder, and I said the only thing I had.

“I am truly sorry,” I told him. “I understand your loss.”

He did not startle. I do not think he had ever once, across the whole of this night, not known exactly where I stood.

“Thank you, Watcher,” he said. “Unfortunately, Tryst is not the only being I have kept from a natural death. So you most certainly do not.” He was quiet for a moment, and then something in him seemed to settle. Whatever feeling he had just discovered he had decided to swallow and deal with it later. “No, I do thank you. Let us get you home.”

The Reaper came about beneath us both, her sails filled, and we sailed out from the Black Tide together, toward a sky where the moon had at last finished its slow theft of the sun, and the light was beginning, thin and grey and then gold, to come back into the world exactly the way it always had, exactly the way it always would, whether anyone watching understood yet what it had cost to get there or not.